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magnussoft today started shipping Magnussoft® ZETA 1.5 Professional, after approximatly one month delay. Their German customers should be getting their CDs from tomorrow on.

Most of the news in the new release have already been covered in articles here on ICO, but a kept secret has been their new coming Service Packs, called MZSP. The new service package system will ensure that your system stays secure and up-to-date. Also it will no longer be necessary to download and install various fixes and patches for single components or programs. The Service Packs will be available free of charge to every registered user. MZSP do not install on older systems, like for example ZETA Neo. In addition, your magnussoft® ZETA has to be activated to be able to complete the installation process.

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This past weekend, Magnussoft made available for everyone to download the demo for their ZETA port of Robin Hood, which you can purchase from their site (the game, not the demo). Weighing in at just under 62MB, the demo will allow you to experience the full game beforehand, hopefully helping you in your decision to buy (or not) the full game, and it features 3 levels from the full game.

So head over, download and install it and taste a bit of Sherwood forest right in your computer. Watch out for the sheriff men though.

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Bryan Varner shot ICO an e-mail, letting us know that he has worked some on Transmission for BeOS and its GUI as well, making it possible to build and use (via GUI) Transmission 0.62, development version (the most recent stable version released is 0.61).

Bryan makes available both the diffs and also a R5 net_server binary. He has also submitted the code to Transmission's source tree, making it possible for anyone to build it if they please (it's quite easy to do). Along with Bryan, there's another developer working on Transmission for BeOS and he hopes that their combined efforts will help make it one of the best Transmission ports around. Good luck to them and thanks for the work (and thanks to Eric too of course).

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Really exciting things are being added to the Haiku OS these days, and it is a joy to write about them. Yesterday Urias McCullough wrote an article about Ingo Weinhold's latest contributions to the project.

First of all, a UserlandFS has been added to the repository. The UserlandFS is designed to provide, for the first time in Haiku (and the BeOS platform), a stable and flexible environment for file system add-on development. Along with UserlandFS, Ingo has also committed several file system modules, including a Reiser FS 3.6 (one of his projects for BeOS) read-only implementation and a RAM FS (which is still work in progress).

Ingo has also implemented a third file system module, NetFS, a Haiku-specific networking file system (seen on the screenshot below). NetFS is a native Haiku network file system that provides peer-to-peer networking capabilities for computers running Haiku on a LAN and includes full support for BFS attributes and live queries.

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This is some brilliant stuff that brings Haiku some major steps forward. Great work Ingo!

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From the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon department, IsComputerOn is proud to present the FlyingTroll project. FlyingTroll is a light documentation browser, very much like Orb, the first browser BeOS had.

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The browser is developed by the Russian developer Nikita Zalyotov (alias Makitka), 21 years old. He first learned about BeOS from russian magazine already back in 2000 and fell instantly in love, as so many of us.

ICO asked Nikita a few questions about his project, and he could tell us that the reason he started it was that Firefox simply isn't the right choice for such a task. When you want to read development documentation or simply the usermanual for an application, you don't want to wait 3-4 seconds each time for Firefox to start. Firefox is great for surfing the web, but for reading documentation he wanted to make a "lite version of NetPositive". And the fact that Haiku needs such a browser.

Nikita tells ICO that his dream is that FlyingTroll becomes part of the Haiku project, and continues with imagine you are installing an application, like Becasso, and the documentation for it is automatically added to the /config/FlyingTroll/Bookmarks/ directory.

For the future Nikita hopes to be able to implement basic network support for the browser, so that users don't have to have all the documentation stored on their local harddrive and if possible printing support.

In the next release of FlyingTroll ((DR3 or DR4), the browser will come bundled with the sources and a FTView class. FTView is a BView with bonus, as you can load HTML code in it. You will also be able to enable/disable scrollbars, statusbar, tollbars and popup menus. For example, you can add this FTView in a mailing program, to show emails in HTML. Or to read history in an ICQ client :). FTView will support printing, networking and possibly also some other options.

On the screenshot the About window is already making use of the FTView class.

ICO would like to thank Nikita for his contributions to the Haiku project, and will be writing about this project as it progresses and releases are made available for us endusers.

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Dane Scott of TuneTracker Systems (and of course LeBuzz and BeOSRadio fame) is looking for a coder who can develop a driver which will allow BeOS/Haiku/ZETA to communicate with two-port serial adapter cards (this is needed since most of the modern motherboards have one serial port only, if at all). This would allow TuneTracker to simultaneously control multiple external devices. For example, the user would be able to control both the touchscreen and the audio switcher hardware, giving him/her the hability to control their entire TT system via the touchscreen interface, thus improving not only the ease of use of the system, but also increasing productivity.

Dane also told me that the driver, once it's completed, will be donated by Dane to the community, allowing BeOS and Haiku to use it in the future, as they please. Another (big) plus is that, the extra revenue which TuneTracker Systems will earn from this, will allow them to help develop new drivers for audio hardware, which in turn will also be donated back to the community, this being a "motto" for TT Systems, that all drivers of public interest will, after being developed, be donated back to the community. And of course, the developer will be paid for his work. So as you can see, this is basically a win-win situation for everyone involved. So if you're up to it and interested, drop Dane a line at "dane AT tunetrackersystems DOT com". 

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Yesterday was the day of Haiku's Tech Talk at Google's campus, and according to Jorge Mare (aka Koki), it was a big success. The talk went very well and was followed by a Q&A session with the attendants. Notably, there were some special guest appearances at the event, most noteworthy Be, Inc's founder and CEO Jean Louis Gassée. Also present were several former Be engineers and also members of the Haiku community, like Andrew Bachmann and Urias McCullough. The presentation was held as usual by Michael Phipps, Bruno Albuquerque and Axel Dorfler and this time, they were joined by JLG himself. You can see more pictures at the Haiku Gallery page. Enjoy and good show everyone.

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Bruno updated last night the Haiku site with the 2nd part of the first day report. In this second post he talks about Michael's Birds of Feather (???) presentation, which was held before a 20 or so group of people, and from their reactions, their response to the project and its goal was quite positive.

They also had the visit of Travis Geiselbrecht, creator of NewOS (the kernel used in Haiku), as you can see from the picture. In another picture, you can see their projector, showing Haiku's amazing 3D desktop effects...

So head over and read it all, we'll be waiting for the Day Two (yesterday) report from Bruno.

Update: Thanks to our reader Fernando Carlos de Sousa for pointing out that Tom's Hardware was also present at SCaLE 5x and took some pictures of Haiku's booth.

Update 2: More media coverage. TG Daily also has a piece on Haiku's presence over at SCaLE. Thanks Andrea.

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As I'm sure you're all aware, Haiku's participating for the first time in SCaLE 5x, the Fifth Annual Southern California Linux Expo. Working the floor are Michael Phipps, Jorge Mare (aka Koki), Axel Dorfler (aka Basement Meister) and Bruno Albuquerque (aka BGA). And Bruno just posted over at the Haiku-OS site the first part of their Day One report. So far it's been going quite well, with lots of people attending and many of those stopping by and showing interest in the Haiku project.

If you're in the neighbourhood you're still in time to head over and meet them, either today or tomorrow. Today at 8pm there's an Introduction to Haiku by Michael Phipps and tomorrow at 7pm a more technical presentation hosted both by Bruno and Axel, which should be impressive, knowing them. Point your GPS to The Westin Los Angeles Airport and have a great time. We'll bring you more as we get the new, so stay tuned.

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As I'm sure you're all aware of, beunited was officially disestablished on January 4th, after several years being a part of the community. After reading Deej's post, I wanted a bit more of information, so I wrote him and asked if he wouldn't mind sharing some more about beunited. Being the nice guy that he is, he replied right away agreeing. So I got a few questions together and within a couple of days, I had his answers.

Update: Deej has just posted a comment answering some follow-up questions that were posted by our readers. Enjoy.

So without further delays, click below for some more insight into beunited.